Every weekend, Windows Central livestreams an Xbox One or Steam game for 1-2 hours and gives out free games to the cool people who join us during the stream. It's like a live podcast, only you also get to watch a game while chatting with our awesome readers and viewers!

Tonight on Mixer, we played Marvel Puzzle Quest: Dark Reign, the superhero-themed puzzle game from D3. Matching gems and battling supervillains doesn't get much better than this! Read on for quick impressions and contest winners.

Just follow us at Mixer.com/WindowsCentral, enable email notifications, watch along, and participate in chat for your chance to win. After the stream ends, be sure to check back for the YouTube replay video and contest winners.

In this game, a mysterious alien element known as ISO-8 (also seen in Spider-Man Unlimited) has appeared on earth. ISO-8 has the ability to bestow people with superpowers, which of course means that both the good guys and bad guys want their hands on it.

Each level of Marvel Puzzle Quest begins with a well-written cinematic (of the talking-head variety) that sees a team of heroes (initially led by Nick Fury and Iron Man) tackling threats and thwarting evildoers' attempts to create havoc with the new alien element. They'll bump into Norman Osborne, the Dark Avengers, and much more supervillains and heroes along the way.

The actual gameplay is just like Puzzle Quest (and quite close to Gems of War). The player team and the enemy team take turns matching three or more gems. These matches deal damage to the other side and provide energy for use with special attacks. The complexity of the special attacks has increased a bit here, but it should all be second nature to puzzle game fans.

Although the mobile and PC versions of Marvel Puzzle Quest are free to play, Marvel Puzzle Quest: Dark Reign for Xbox One and PlayStation 4 is a $14.99 paid game. There are no free to play elements at all, so you can experience the whole story and unlock all 54 characters through natural progression. If you like superheroes and puzzle games, you won't want to miss this one!

The Contest

We streamed Marvel Puzzle Quest: Dark Reign for ~80 minutes. During that time, we gave out a total of twenty game codes:

Ten for Xbox One

Five for PlayStation 4 (North American accounts only)

Five for Steam

See the contest winners at the end of this story.

What is Mixer?

We stream exclusively on Mixer, Microsoft's interactive livestreaming platform. It provides some welcome improvements over Twitch, such as a cleaner website layout, built-in stream interactivity, and extremely low latency.

You can follow our channel at Mixer.com/WindowsCentral. From there, you'll be able to watch the stream and participate in chat directly from any web browser, including the Xbox One and Windows Phone browsers. Mobile apps are also available for Android on iOS.

Future streams

Want to know what's next for Windows Central's weekend Mixer programming? We stream a different game every Saturday (and sometimes Sunday). The stream always starts at the same time: 9pm ET (8pm CT, 6pm PT, 2am GMT). Over the next few weeks, we'll be streaming the following (schedule not finalized):